Month: May 2017

‘Writing from the heart’ has been a recurrent theme throughout the Teachers as Writers project. Teachers and writers together have drawn on life experience, memory and emotion as resources for writing in their classrooms, sometimes to powerful effect. The poem below was written and shared aloud by Harry (Year 9) during one such lesson, co-taught by teacher and professional poet. Continue reading “I remember”

Teachers as Writers Research Report Launched Today

Teresa Cremin, Professor of Literacy in Education, The Open University

The report of the partnership between Arvon, The Open University and University of Exeter into Teachers as Writers is launched today!

This two year project reveals new insights about the value of teachers expanding their own understanding about writing and being a writer through working with professional writers. It highlights consequences for classrooms, both primary and secondary, including:

the significance of time and space to ‘Just Write’ (who owns the space to write?);

the potency of the personal and drawing on life experience (who frames their content choices?);

the value of investing more energy and effort in revising (whose choices are these?);

the need to develop students’ autonomy as writers (whose writing is it anyway?).

Professional writers, the research reveals, whilst also responsive to their publishers, exert considerable agency as authors. The teachers too found their authorial agency upheld as they generated, shaped and polished chosen pieces of writing- they were free to write, albeit supported by the Arvon tutors.

Loyal readers of this blog will remember Debra’s recent entry on the value of just writing. Just writing, the spontaneous commitment of words to the page while they are fresh in the writer’s mind, is something that almost all the Teachers as Writers teachers have committed themselves to including in their class’s regular timetable. Not only does just writing capture spontaneous ideas before they escape, it also helps writers overcome the fear of the blank page by suspending all the rules that can inhibit flow: not just the rules of spelling and grammar, but also the rule that it all has to be consistent or even make sense. All that stuff can be dealt with later. Continue reading “A chance to stop and think”

By Dr Anthony Wilson, Senior Lecturer, Graduate School of Education, University of Exeter

One of the more interesting paradoxes of analysing the interviews of professional writers during the Teachers as Writers (TaW) project has been the finding that many of the writers struggled when we asked them to define their ‘craft knowledge’ of writing. I call this a paradox because, when they spoke about other aspects of their writing life and process, they displayed abundant craft knowledge. From a researcher’s point of view this has led us to asking that if writers were more consciously aware of their own expertise, might they be better able to share it with children and teachers when working in schools? Continue reading “What do I know?”